Infinite Loop —

iPad cooking app showdown: holiday week edition

We go hands-on again with five cooking apps to see which comes out well-done.

The last time we took a look at cooking apps for the iPad back in August, it was a hit. That unexpectedly popular post generated tons of reader e-mail with more suggestions—and questions—about other cooking apps geared towards different needs. Indeed, there are plenty of cooking apps out there, and we only touched on what we thought were the best handful of them. But the rest can't be all bad, right?

That's why we decided to do another cooking app roundup, just in time for some of you to use them to make (or assist with) that huge, overwhelming holiday meal coming up next week. But don't worry, we're not focusing entirely on apps that excel in turkeys and cranberry sauce—not everyone is into "traditional" holiday food items. You can use these apps at any time, really; we're just happy to have another excuse to write about cooking and the iPad.

So, after asking my Twitter followers for a new rash of recommendations, the following five apps were the ones that appeared the most interesting and of the highest quality. I gave them all a quick hands-on to see how they work, so let's dive in:

I have a recently updated version of the (ginormous) Cook's Illustrated book, so I'm familiar with the excellent style of its creators. I did not, however, realize that the Cook's Illustrated app would basically be a magazine app for a magazine about cooking when I first downloaded it. Indeed, like other magazine apps, the app itself is free but the content costs money—it's $5.99 per issue for relatively recent issues, or $1.99 per one month subscription ($19.99 for the year). There is no way to get content on this app without paying money for something, so if that's not your thing, this app won't do anything for you. That said, I bought the November/December issue through the app's in-app purchasing system and waited for the entire 390MB to download.

By now, you may already be thinking that this app sounds like a pain in the ass. But once I got into it, I kinda started to like it. Because of its magazine format, each issue comes with an article and recipes to go along with it. The articles had tappable links to the corresponding recipes and vice versa; I liked how the articles/recipes weren't crammed onto one view. Each article has a header image that starts in black and white and slowly turns to color, which is kind of neat but overall kind of a gimmick.

When it comes to the recipes, I thought the layout and availability of information was just right. There are videos to go long with the recipes, which is nice for people who learn best by watching (and the video is AirPlayable, at that). There's also a "cooking mode" that you can access from each recipe, which is basically a pictorial step-by-step—again, useful for those visual learners, but especially those who might do better with still photos than video. I particularly liked this feature.

If video's not your thing, step-by-step photo instructions might be more preferable.

On the downside, there's no apparent way to bookmark or favorite a recipe to come back later, or even to share it with yourself or friends. This was a big downside for me personally, because I like to spend time browsing recipes before I'm ready to cook them—I can't see myself digging through the magazine again just to find a recipe I liked and I'd like to be able to just bookmark it somehow.

Still, I enjoyed this app as someone who likes cooking magazines—I really do read it for the articles—but it wasn't quite what I was expecting as a "cooking app." Depending on how you like to learn, this app may or may not gel with you, but for the book nerd types, it might be a nice one to try.

The 2.0 version of Evernote Food was just released in the last week, and for those of us who had no idea there was such a thing as Evernote Food, it's essentially a version of Evernote that is specifically geared toward the foodie. The new app is universal and isn't just focused on cooking: it includes the ability to collect recipes from the web, search and save restaurants you want to dine at, and record your own food adventures in one single app.

Evernote Food now has a restaurant search/bookmarking function.

For the purposes of this writeup, I'll focus mostly on the cooking. But I still want to give a little heads up to the other features (which I did tinker with), because you may end up finding those equally (if not more) useful than the recipe/cooking features. The restaurant searching feature is location-based with data provided by foursquare—each restaurant listing can come with its own menu (viable from within the app) and you can "clip" them to save for later. This ties into the meal logging/recording feature, which can apply to pretty much anything you want, whether it's a restaurant meal or something you cooked at home.

If you're the type to take photos of your own food creations, this app is what you want.

For those of us who fancy ourselves experienced home chefs—or even those of us who are not so experienced—the ability to record details about meals you've had can be really fun. You can attach dates, tags, places, and even photos of your food for record-keeping, or you can choose to share them via Facebook and Twitter. If you're not the type to care about what your past meals looked or tasted like—you're probably the same person who hates food pics on Twitter—then this feature isn't likely to excite you.

Now for the cooking. Evernote Food is unique among the apps in this comparison—but not unique among the apps I compared in August—in that it allows you to bring in recipes you found elsewhere on the Web via the "Evernote Web Clipper" browser plug-in (you can also clip from within the app itself). So, for example, I can still use this app with many of my longtime favorite recipes that I've already bookmarked from Epicurious and the Food Network—the app can figure out what's a recipe and what's not and will only bring in recipe type Evernote clips.

A recipe I clipped from NPR's website on the Web, imported into Evernote Food.

When you view a clipped recipe, it appears to display within the app in as sane a manner as it can—sometimes this means there are odd floaty buttons leftover from the Web page's own layout (see above), but otherwise I found this to be satisfactory. If you use the Web a lot to find recipes, particularly during the day when you're supposed to be working, this might be the best app out of the bunch for that particular use case. To note, there's no shopping list function in this app and it's not really big on the multimedia elements like some of the others (namely, Cook's Illustrated and Jamie's Recipes). But if you want a straightforward, Evernote-like version of a cooking app, it's hard not to recommend this one.

Jamie's Recipes is essentially an app put together entirely by chef and food activist Jamie Oliver. And like some of the other apps in this comparison (but not so much the previous one), Jamie's app focuses pretty much on his own recipes that he offers through the app as in-app purchases. There are $0.99 "packs" for different groupings of recipes, like Date Night, Crowd Pleasers, 10-Minute Meals, Classic Comfort Food, Holiday Feasts, and more—I felt the selection was very extensive, so it would be hard to get bored (and the price is certainly right, at least for me). But even if you're not sure about spending that dollar, the app comes with a free "Taster Pack" with 10 recipes and 3 videos that you can use without incurring any costs.

The app itself is actually more of a mishmash between more generalized cooking apps and a very focused one: it has features like the ability to favorite recipes so you can easily access them later, there's a shopping list function if you decide to make a particular recipe but need to buy the ingredients first, and it lets you make notes on each recipe. The recipes also suggest "useful related videos," which as I mentioned earlier in this piece, can be very helpful for the visually inclined.

In terms of usability, I really liked this app although I was a bit disappointed that it doesn't let you bring in your own recipes or those from the Web. It's particularly useful if you're looking for certain styles of food; the Holiday Feasts pack is a great one if you want a bunch of high-quality recipes for Christmastime and you don't feel like searching through thousands of online options. There's also relatively little commitment when trying out this app, so there's no reason not to give it a spin.

This app came highly recommended from several Twitter followers, so I downloaded what I could find as the "lite" version of the app. It turns out "lite" means it's restricted to a menu and recipes from one chef, while the others are accessible through the paid version of the Great British Chefs (Feastive) app. And, as you might guess from the app's name, the app really is focused on chefs—all the recipes are offered on a per-chef basis, and are laid out in a "menu" from each chef with only one item per course.

Based on that description, it shouldn't surprise you that this app isn't exactly loaded with tons and tons of recipes, but what the recipes it does offer are pretty good. Great British Chefs lets you favorite recipes for later (as it should!) and you can also share recipes via Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail. When you send one via e-mail, the entire recipe text goes into the body of the message along with a photo, which I definitely like—it's certainly better than sending the recipe as an attachment or even a Web link.

There's also a shopping list feature in this one—although it's not an uncommon thing to have, it surprised me with this app because it's otherwise not a particularly traditional cooking app. Overall, I didn't dislike this one, but I felt the creators placed looks and flash above content, and it just wasn't my favorite to mess around in from a usability standpoint. There are other apps that offer similar or more rich functionality that I think work much better, but if you're in love with a particular British chef and want to parrot those recipes, then this might be the app for you.

Of all the apps in this piece, The Photo Cookbook is the only one that costs money up front. As we've learned, though, many of these other apps get you with various in-app purchases and subscriptions (with the exception of Evernote Food)—all things considered, $3.99 isn't bad at all for an app that offers a wide selection of recipes with no other add-ons.

The Photo Cookbook is a new one to me—I hadn't heard of it until a few of my Twitter followers gave it high praise. But I'm very glad I shelled out the money for the download, because it might be one of my favorite apps from the entire list. The main screen divides you into different categories, like meat, fish, vegetarian, and desserts, with the ability to sort by different popular cuisines (Quick & Easy, Italian, Asian, and Baking). Each column scrolls individually with images, so you get a nice eye-full of each recipe you might choose to make.

The main recipe view shows you the ingredients laid out in a raw state, similar to what you might see at the beginning of a cooking show. Otherwise, the functionality is pretty simplistic—you just scroll up and down on a single page to look at photo-based instructions for each step, which (again) can be extremely helpful for the visually inclined or the beginner. This is more of an instructional "how-to" type app than the others, and I like how it presents information to the reader—it is called the "photo cookbook" after all.

Step-by-step photo instructions of what everything is supposed to look like is this app's strength.

There's also a search function within the app that works relatively well—when I typed "turkey" into the search, it showed me badges indicating there were two turkey-based recipes in Quick & Easy, and one in Italian. The recipe view also lets you favorite, share over e-mail (which also includes the whole recipe in plaintext), and add custom notes—nearly everything I like in a cooking app. And on some recipes, there are little tips on each recipe item for more info: when I tapped on a tip for prosciutto di Parma, it showed me a closer-up photo along with some history about the ingredient. Again, this isn't just useful for food nerds, it can be very useful for beginners who may not realize why certain elements are important to a recipe.

Like most of the others, there's no way to bring in your own recipes into this app. But still, I felt the built-in selection was wide enough to make it worth the money, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the Photo Cookbook to almost anyone looking for some new instruction on making delicious food.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui

I can't recommend this highly enough. How to Cook Everything, which is based on (and supersedes in every way) Mark Bittman's cookbook of the same name.

Anyway - there's no nickle-and-diming on this app. It contains everything from the encyclopedic cookbook. On the tech-y side, the recipes can be scaled, and include timers, built into the steps, that you can start (and stack.). Shopping lists can also be created and the results sorted by grocery store section.

I can't recommend this highly enough. How to Cook Everything, which is based on (and supersedes in every way) Mark Bittman's cookbook of the same name.

Anyway - there's no nickle-and-diming on this app. It contains everything from the encyclopedic cookbook. On the tech-y side, the recipes can be scaled, and include timers, built into the steps, that you can start (and stack.). Shopping lists can also be created and the results sorted by grocery store section.

It is outstanding, but it was the first thing covered in the previous article. One nice benefit of the How To Cook Everything app is that, since it's universal, I can have a recipe on my phone while I'm shopping for ingredients, then use the iPad version when I'm actually cooking.

A copule of collegues of mine made a cooking app that made tha Best of awards 2012. They combine easy to cook recipies, narrated and illustrated by awardwinning chefs, and have a hands free UI.. Tailored for cooking. It integrates video, how-tos, tips and tricks, and anecdotes from the chef, and new editions are released on a regular interval. It's a cook book, a lifestyle magazine and a documentary rolled into one great app.

And it ties into a built-in shopping list. So I pick a recipe and add what to buy straight from it.

Ad it's well-designed. I use Paprika on my Mac to clip recipes from the web with one click. Then I always have all my recipes on my iPhone for shopping. And I use my iPad to display the recipes while I cook. I tried a bunch and its the best by some measure.

Has it occured to anyone that there is an insane amount of free recipes on the 'net? Maybe, just maybe, we freakin' don't need an app for that! Just sayin'.

That's the beauty of Paprika, you can within the app, capture and save recipes from many sites to keep in one central location. So instead of searching through AllRecipies until you find the one you used last time you can have it at your finger tips.

mbjoe wrote:

flyingember wrote:

Paprika

Collects from many sources into oneMac, iPad and iPhone

And it ties into a built-in shopping list. So I pick a recipe and add what to buy straight from it.

Ad it's well-designed. I use Paprika on my Mac to clip recipes from the web with one click. Then I always have all my recipes on my iPhone for shopping. And I use my iPad to display the recipes while I cook. I tried a bunch and its the best by some measure.

I have to agree, as someone that uses an iPad as a digital recipe manager and cookbook every day Paprika is the best choice. I've made an effort that every recipe I make gets entered into Paprika prior to cooking and synced as well.

Giorgio652 wrote:

Why is this just for the iPad? Other tablets exist - surely it would have not been too much harder to cover android as well?!

Paprika works on Android as well, it will be one of the first apps I buy after opening my Nexus 7 on Christmas.

Has it occured to anyone that there is an insane amount of free recipes on the 'net? Maybe, just maybe, we freakin' don't need an app for that! Just sayin'.

That's the beauty of Paprika, you can within the app, capture and save recipes from many sites to keep in one central location. So instead of searching through AllRecipies until you find the one you used last time you can have it at your finger tips.

mbjoe wrote:

flyingember wrote:

Paprika

Collects from many sources into oneMac, iPad and iPhone

And it ties into a built-in shopping list. So I pick a recipe and add what to buy straight from it.

Ad it's well-designed. I use Paprika on my Mac to clip recipes from the web with one click. Then I always have all my recipes on my iPhone for shopping. And I use my iPad to display the recipes while I cook. I tried a bunch and its the best by some measure.

I have to agree, as someone that uses an iPad as a digital recipe manager and cookbook every day Paprika is the best choice. I've made an effort that every recipe I make gets entered into Paprika prior to cooking and synced as well.

Giorgio652 wrote:

Why is this just for the iPad? Other tablets exist - surely it would have not been too much harder to cover android as well?!

Paprika works on Android as well, it will be one of the first apps I buy after opening my Nexus 7 on Christmas.

You need an app if sensor interface is required. GPS, compass, etc. You don't need an app for everything.

At some point, making an app for the task is silly. The shark has been jumped.

You need an app if sensor interface is required. GPS, compass, etc. You don't need an app for everything.

At some point, making an app for the task is silly. The shark has been jumped.

Troll is obvious. What I "need" an app for is not for you to decide. Apps often offer better user interfaces than web equivalents, especially on a touch device. That is valuable to me, and easily trumps the overall accessibility of the web. It's the same reason why I use a dedicated e-mail client on my desktop computer and not gmail's web interface. The less I'm forced to use the web as my only option to access content, the better (at the same time, content being locked *only* into an app is even more obnoxious. The choice between the two benefits all users, all preferences, all devices).

Different people have vastly different tastes. More useful than trying to decide which is best would be a discussion of which are targeted to what audiences. Do you need a quick recipe with generic ingredients? Or do you want to explore less common vegetables and grains? Carnivore, vegetarian or vegan? ...

Cook's Illustrated is the business but if people are considering it, they might be better off with the online membership to the website, https://www.cooksillustrated.com/ given the ability to search, archive off recipes into the likes of Evernote Food, etc.

Cook's Illustrated does have an app for the iPhone which gives access to all their online subscriber recipes, reviews, comparison tests. Would be fantastic if they offered an iPad version. But the Newsstand model has been taken instead, handsome it may be, I would prefer a dedicated app.

I'd recommend people check out Panna, a six-a-year video magazine, with a selection of video recipes/tutorials from a set of excellent cooks. Very polished, quite an interesting and enjoyable re-imagining of a cookery television show. Recipes can be stopped step-by-step.

Most disappointing direction this year is the direction taken by the up-to-now excellent Gojee. This app took select recipes from the food blogger community and presented them in a stylish and searchable form, providing links back to the original sites. Sadly the app has been hijacked by a voice which seems more fashionista than foodie, there are sections on dresses, shoes and lingerie now. Presumably they'd sooner, eh, go out for dinner...

Most of those, including the pizza drawer, are just plain dumb. Is that all from Sky Mall? Pizzas need a lot of heat and a drawer that small will lose it all as soon as it gets opened. Who needs a gadget to break an egg? Who has bananas that are always the same size and curvature? I slice mine with a great invention called a knife.

I'm using the "How to Cook Everything" app. Besides being a good app I haven't failed to find a suitable recipe yet and they have all turned out great. There's a cheesecake on the bench right now from it.

Hmm so I just looked up the Photo Cookbook on the iTunes Store and it looks like the 5 categories are all available separately as $3.99 each. If you bought them all would you end up with 5 apps or do you start with one and then in-app purchases let you add into the same app? If it's the former that would suck

You need an app if sensor interface is required. GPS, compass, etc. You don't need an app for everything.

At some point, making an app for the task is silly. The shark has been jumped.

Troll is obvious. What I "need" an app for is not for you to decide. Apps often offer better user interfaces than web equivalents, especially on a touch device. That is valuable to me, and easily trumps the overall accessibility of the web. It's the same reason why I use a dedicated e-mail client on my desktop computer and not gmail's web interface. The less I'm forced to use the web as my only option to access content, the better (at the same time, content being locked *only* into an app is even more obnoxious. The choice between the two benefits all users, all preferences, all devices).

Hint: your email came from a network. You then downloaded it to your PC.

Hint: you can download content from a network and save it to your PC. That would work for recipes.

Funny how you completely ignored the crux of my statement -- that user interfaces matter, and apps provide an opportunity to access network-content without local storage using a user interface that is specific and appropriate to a given device, whether it be a computer, a mobile phone, or a tablet.

Don't want to use that method? Then don't: You're free to use the web, or whatever your Blackberry offers.

Funny how you completely ignored the crux of my statement -- that user interfaces matter, and apps provide an opportunity to access network-content without local storage using a user interface that is specific and appropriate to a given device, whether it be a computer, a mobile phone, or a tablet.

Don't want to use that method? Then don't: You're free to use the web, or whatever your Blackberry offers.

Funny, a browser provides the opportunity to access network content. By reading the user agent, the data can be formatted appropriately. Better yet, the only thing ever requiring an update is the browser itself. Apps on the other hand occupy space on your device, even if the data is in the cloud. They need updating, and having the ability to execute on your device means potential security breaches.

I've been working with a great cook trying to get some of his recipes into the digital world. My first reaction was to create a book in the iBook store, but after looking at these apps there really is no comparison between what you can do with an app vs the iBook. Does any one know if there are any cook book apps that sell the source code so you can make your own cook book app? or any app developers that want to buy recipes?

Paprika has been a killer solution for keeping and managing recipes. It can be expensive but the ability to switch between units and scale the recipe has been pretty helpful. It also now works on the Nexus 7 for a little bit more flexibility in cross-platform use.

Better yet, the only thing ever requiring an update is the browser itself. Apps on the other hand occupy space on your device, even if the data is in the cloud. They need updating, and having the ability to execute on your device means potential security breaches.

Oh dear. We've clearly not heard of code injections, have we. Bless. Be careful out there, m'kay little fella, it's a dangerous place when you think you know it all...

Perhaps I'm not the typical user, but it appears that none of these reviewed apps offers what I want: the ability to store my own recipes, and to work with them (search, scale, annotate, modify). Sure, I use recipes from my own collection of cookbooks, or that I download from the usual online suspects. But most of them end up being changed, sometimes substantially, to suit my own needs and preferences, and then ultimately saved in modified form.

It's not clear to me what real benefit any of the reviewed apps offer over firing up a browser and searching Epicurious.

This was a fun article I will enjoy poking at the article. I would add that Cooks Country is also a available similar to Cook's Illustrated. I would add that for the iPhone American Test Kitchen has a free app with lots of recipes. This is useful for cooking but it really shines when shopping and finding recipes to pick for a meal. I particularly like the Trat Kitchen reviews of food and gadgets. For example which Balsmic Vinigar or tomato paste or olive oil or Dutch process chocolate to buy.

What exactly does this "shopping list" feature do that was mentioned several times? Does it simply list the ingredients of the recipe or a chosen subset again in a certain format or is there more to it?

Is there any cooking app that lets you search by ingredients, i.e. you tell it what you have in the kitchen and it will show you recipes that can be done using only these ingredients or very little additional ones?

Perhaps I'm not the typical user, but it appears that none of these reviewed apps offers what I want: the ability to store my own recipes, and to work with them (search, scale, annotate, modify). Sure, I use recipes from my own collection of cookbooks, or that I download from the usual online suspects. But most of them end up being changed, sometimes substantially, to suit my own needs and preferences, and then ultimately saved in modified form.

If you're on a Mac, MacGourmet does all of what you're looking for, and will take a shot at intelligently transcribing a recipe (correctly parsing out ingredients, notes, directions, yield, etc.) based on a URL from many of the popular recipe sites. iOS companion apps also available. I've been happily using it for years.

Quote:

It's not clear to me what real benefit any of the reviewed apps offer over firing up a browser and searching Epicurious.

Far better UI, ability to use w/o an internet connection, for starters. In the case of Bittman's How To Cook Everything app, the full text of the book, electronically searchable and enhanced, for a fraction of the price of the dead tree version.

Better yet, the only thing ever requiring an update is the browser itself. Apps on the other hand occupy space on your device, even if the data is in the cloud. They need updating, and having the ability to execute on your device means potential security breaches.

Oh dear. We've clearly not heard of code injections, have we. Bless. Be careful out there, m'kay little fella, it's a dangerous place when you think you know it all...

There is nothing more dangerous to security than installing an app. Period end of story. Sure browser exploits exist, but you are giving execute permission to an app.

Well it will be entertaining when your cooking app downloads your address book and spams your friends with email from you praising said app. As a bonus, it will upload all your nudie photos to Tumbler. Just hope it doesn't fink you out to your health insurance about your lust for foie gras (oink oink).

Has it occured to anyone that there is an insane amount of free recipes on the 'net? Maybe, just maybe, we freakin' don't need an app for that! Just sayin'.

Recipie access is one thing. Integrated timers, recipie scaling, embeded notes, marking favorite recipies (that don't get taken down or moved by the time several years later when you go looking for that link), searching by ingredients, checking off steps, building grocery lists, seeing the same recipie stored on multiple devices, not needing an internet connection when using it (handy at work where such things might be blocked), yea, the apps do have very valid reasons for being.

Better yet, the only thing ever requiring an update is the browser itself. Apps on the other hand occupy space on your device, even if the data is in the cloud. They need updating, and having the ability to execute on your device means potential security breaches.

Oh dear. We've clearly not heard of code injections, have we. Bless. Be careful out there, m'kay little fella, it's a dangerous place when you think you know it all...

There is nothing more dangerous to security than installing an app. Period end of story. Sure browser exploits exist, but you are giving execute permission to an app.

Well it will be entertaining when your cooking app downloads your address book and spams your friends with email from you praising said app. As a bonus, it will upload all your nudie photos to Tumbler. Just hope it doesn't fink you out to your health insurance about your lust for foie gras (oink oink).

lol. Friend, we have a multi-tier security architecture here, active firewalls, content filtering, automatied patching and system imaging, corporate antivirus, highly tightened security settings, managed plug-in compliance and updating, and more. 80% of the ciruses penetrating our network come from websites. In fanc, nearly half of them come from what would otherwise be trusted sources (known sites, real businesses, etc, places that themselves got hacked and going to their site infects you with no action of your own other than going there). Downloaded apps from trusted sources are extremely unlikely to have a virus. Less than 0.001% of iDevices have downloaded a virus from apple. About 5% of Android have downloaded one, but even with that we're including a massicve class of just "malicios" apps that mostly just steal contact information to generate spam to others.

Any PC can be infected by going to ANY website (even microsoft.com has spread viruses to its users before). With apps, especially signed apps ,the ods of downloading a security risk are extremely small, and almost exclusively are limited to the first few days/weeks after an app is posted. Much of this is the security screenings themselves, but the real security barrier: You have to link your developer account for apple to a verifyable aggress and bank account, which creates one hell of a paper trail for the FBI to find you if you;re posting malucious apps through Apple.

Saying that browsing the web is more secure than downloading an app uis just pure lunacy, and a complete misunderstanding of system security principles.

Perhaps I'm not the typical user, but it appears that none of these reviewed apps offers what I want: the ability to store my own recipes, and to work with them (search, scale, annotate, modify). Sure, I use recipes from my own collection of cookbooks, or that I download from the usual online suspects. But most of them end up being changed, sometimes substantially, to suit my own needs and preferences, and then ultimately saved in modified form.

It's not clear to me what real benefit any of the reviewed apps offer over firing up a browser and searching Epicurious.

Perhaps I'm not the typical user, but it appears that none of these reviewed apps offers what I want: the ability to store my own recipes, and to work with them (search, scale, annotate, modify). Sure, I use recipes from my own collection of cookbooks, or that I download from the usual online suspects. But most of them end up being changed, sometimes substantially, to suit my own needs and preferences, and then ultimately saved in modified form.

It's not clear to me what real benefit any of the reviewed apps offer over firing up a browser and searching Epicurious.

It's indicated in the review that this is an addendum to a previous article that was more comprehensive. That article covered a number of solutions that do what you want. I use Paprika, and its very good.

I'm at my family home for the holidays, and I've been using Siri to dictate some of my Mom's recipes into it. Surprisingly accurate, even on obscure ingredients.

On my wish list, I wish paprika allowed you to vary the display of recipes (I'd like to be able to change the styling, which is clear but uninspired), and I'd love an "across the room view" for when I'm cooking and don't want to walk over to where the iPad is situated.

For those who don't understand the benefit of an app with cloud sync (and metadata, scaling, categorization, ingredient search, shopping list, a built-in browser with automated recipe capture, etc.) over the web, I don't know what to say. Believe me, it is vastly better in just about every way, but if you are happy with the web, Godspeed!